Doctor Who and the Empire of Glass | Page 8

amazed at his old friend's survival. One of the stilettos had entered Sarpi's right ear, passed through his temple, shattered his jaw and exited through his right cheek. Sarpi had claimed that God was smiling on him that day. Galileo couldn't help thinking that if that was God smiling, what must his wrath be like?
He hauled himself up the ladder and on to the platform. The air was cold, and the platform gave slightly beneath his bulk. Just his luck if a strut snapped, sending the greatest philosophical mind in Christendom tumbling into the alley below. Thus did God check the excess pride of man.
He walked to the edge of the platform, past the velvet-shrouded object in the centre and the chair beside it, and gazed out across the city. The sky was the deep purple of grapes, and tinged with fire along one edge where the sun had descended beneath the line of houses. Soon it would be night. The moon had already risen like a plate of burnished pewter sent spinning across the sky.His moon. The object given to him by God for his own personal glory. The flambeaux that burned across the city, illuminating the distant campanile tower with fitful light, mirrored the searing ambition in his heart.
He reached out and tugged the velvet cloth off the shrouded object, throwing it carelessly across the chair. The spyglass beneath - brass half-covered with scarlet cloth - shone in the last few glimmerings of sunlight. About the length of his arm, it sat on a tripod inscribed with calibrations, symbols and Latin inscriptions. He had constructed it in his own workshop in Padua, based on what his friends and his spies had heard of Hans Lipper-shey's work in Germany, but he wouldn't be telling the Doge that. No, as far as the Venetian nobles were concerned, he had invented the whole thing himself. What to look at? He could turn it North, towards the Italian coast, and onwards towards Padua and beautiful Marina. Or he could turn it South, gazing out into the Adriatic Sea and the incoming fishing boats.
He smiled to himself. Marina would be asleep and the fishing boats would wait. No, there was only one choice. He swivelled the spyglass upwards and aligned it roughly towards the silvery disc of the moon. By eye he could make out the mysterious shapes that lay across its surface like veils, but with the spyglass he could make out rough circles and lines that changed their appearance as the sun moved in relation to them and its rays struck them at different angles. Nobody else had seen what he was seeing! The knowledge almost made him drunk with delight.
He removed the leather cap from the glass lens and sat down in the chair. Leaning forward, he gazed through the glass. Perhaps tonight God would inspire him to discover what these shapes were, and why they changed.
The moon's surface was startlingly white - bone white - with fuzzy grey shapes marring its perfection. Galileo forgot the cold, and forgot the uncomfortable position that he had to adopt, as his eye scanned the surface, looking for -
He jerked back suddenly, almost upsetting his chair. That couldn't be right. Surely not. He bent down and gazed through the lens again, then blinked a couple of times. Perhaps what he had seen was a mote in his eye, or a bird passing across his field of view. He looked again. It was still there: an object, too small to recognize but too large to ignore. Its shape was circular, like a discus, and it spun rapidly while moving in a straight line. It was moving at an angle, but there was no doubt that it was heading away from the surface of the moon and towards him.




Chapter Two
"Would you like me to row for a while?" Vicki asked. "Or are you just resting for a moment?" Steven tried to detect some note of sarcasm in her voice, but she was too good for that. He tried to mutter a sarcastic rejoinder, but he was panting too hard to get the words out.
"Yes, put your back into it, my boy,' the Doctor said. 'I want to make landfall before breakfast, you know."
Steven had been rowing the inflatable dinghy for what seemed like hours, and he was tired. No, he was worse than tired: he was exhausted. Bone-wearingly, mind-achingly exhausted. His arms had progressed from fatigue through burning pain to a distant numbness, and his mind had become fixated on details like the texture of the material that the dinghy was made out of, and the way the Doctor's ring glowed in the darkness.
The sun had set some time ago, and the moon hung overhead like a tossed coin frozen at its apogee. The distant